Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi to deploy Tribal to improve student experience from enquiry and enrolment to graduation and alumni.
Tribal Group, a leading provider of software and services to the international education market, has announced that it has been awarded a five year SaaS contract to replace Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi’s Student Management System.
Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi is a publicly owned tertiary education institution based in Whakatane which provides education in a Māori cultural context to 6,000 students. The organization’s vision is to pursue knowledge to the greatest depths and its broadest horizons, and to empower the descendants of Awanuiārangi and all Māori to claim and develop their cultural heritage.
Tribal Group won the contract following an extensive procurement process during which the organization concluded that the Tribal Student Management System (SMS) was most suited for the educator’s requirements for a student management system.
These included the need to:
- Improve the student experience from enquiry, application and enrolment through to graduation and alumni
- Improve service delivery by managing quality, reducing risk and cutting turnaround times
- Create efficiencies for the organization by improving reporting and lines of communication and reducing time and cost caused by workarounds
- Improve accessibility of staff to student information to enable improved result and program management, auditability and transparency
- Integrate timetabling, rostering and attendance marking to enable improved management of these areas
Wiremu Doherty, CEO, Awanuiārangi, said: “Our current SMIS plateaued in its ability to service the needs of our staff and students. We looked for a replacement system that would improve the student experience from their first enquiry to graduation, increase our accessibility to information and enable us to better manage our programs.
“We selected Tribal as they met our business needs in a forward-thinking way.
“Their product offers powerful workflows, reporting solutions, integrated time tabling and various stakeholder portals.
“Furthermore, Awanuiārangi is looking forward to implementing a system that is focussed on delivering an excellent student experience and improving operational efficiency.”
The core Student Management System (SMS) will be based on Tribal’s ebs, hosted in the Tribal Cloud. It will also include the ebs:intel extension for business intelligence reporting, delivered via third party partner Panintelligence.
Alongside ebs will sit Tribal’s Student Marketing and Recruitment, Event Management and Alumni Management Solutions. These CRM solutions are specifically tailored to the needs of the education sector and built on the Microsoft Power Platform. Delivered in the cloud and specifically built for the education sector, they extend the capability of ebs to construct and maintain a full 360-degree view of the student from initial enquiry to alumni management.
Awanuiārangi will also adopt Tribal’s Student Engage mobile app as a private social network to connect the entire Wānanga community. It will engage students, staff, departments and businesses and provide students with a secure collaborative space to learn and support each other.
This latest contract win for Tribal Group adds to the organization’s increasing number of Student Management Solution customers in the tertiary education sector in New Zealand and will be the ninth customer to implement ebs in two years.
Steve Exley, Tribal’s General Manager – New Zealand, said: “We’re delighted that Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi has chosen to adopt a full suite of Tribal solutions to manage the student journey. It is a significant win for Tribal being the first customer in New Zealand to adopt our Student Marketing and Recruitment, Event Management and Alumni Management Solutions as well as the Student Engage App. We are pleased to be on the journey with Awanuiārangi and are looking forward to continuing the relationship and kicking off the implementation.”
The project commenced in early March with initiation and discovery workshops underway. Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi plans to go live with phase one of the implementation in June 2022.
We asked Wiremu Doherty, CEO, Awanuiārangi, further questions about the implementation.
Why did you decide that the Tribal Student Management System best suited your needs?
We selected Tribal as they met our business needs in a forward-thinking way whilst considering our programmes and communities across Aotearoa. Their product offers powerful workflows, reporting solutions, integrated timetabling and various stakeholder portals.
How will the deployment allow you to improve the student experience?
The Tribal product offers a student portal where tauira (students) are able to track their study with Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi including their enrolments, finance, results, timetables and attendance all in one place.
What will be the major benefits of improved reporting capabilities?
We have a lot of information which would be more useful if data sets could be combined. We are hoping, therefore, that the new reporting system will provide contextualised information in a visual format. The reporting solution also offers a useful data mining tool for extracting data from the system for operational purposes.
What will be the major advantages of the deployment to your staff?
The ability of different entry points for different types of users is a major benefit. This allows light users, such as lecturers, to enter via the staff portal, while administrative users have a database view via another interface.
Staff will be able to receive a personalised view of information that is relevant to them such as links to their timetables, students and the courses they teach.
How important is it to obtain a full 360-degree view of the student from initial enquiry to alumni management?
Having a beginning-to-end viewpoint helps us service the needs of our tauira more efficiently. Many of our tauira return to us for further study and we want to support them throughout their tauira journey.
What are the advantages of your new system compared to your old one?
The Tribal system offers powerful workflows, extended reporting solutions, integrated timetabling and various stakeholder portals, which we do not currently have.
Why did you choose to work with Tribal?
The Tribal product satisfied our business needs and has a close alignment to the values of the wānanga. They also offer extensive experience in system implementation in the New Zealand tertiary education environment.
